Confessions of a Community College Dean

In grad school, I openly envied my colleagues in the sciences. It wasn’t the slightly higher stipends or the chance to play with cool toys, as real as both of those were. It was the opportunity to work on a regular basis with a lab group.

Bloomberg news yesterday ran a story about the University of Phoenix, in which it reported drops in quarterly earnings and share price as a function of a drop in enrollment. The headline reflected net income and enrollment. But the real news was buried in the fifth paragraph.

Over the break, I had a welcome chance to catch up on my reading. Through the miracle of Twitter -- which I think of as an annotated bibliography that self-updates in real time -- I ran across these two articles, and couldn’t help noticing how they crash into each other.

Last Friday I had the chance to drop by the MLA conference for the first time ever. In my faculty days, I used to attend APSA fairly regularly; now I can sometimes be found at the League for Innovation or the AACC. The MLA was a new one. But between an opportunity to participate in a bloggers’ panel in the Exhibit Hall Theater and an unusually accessible location, I couldn’t turn it down.

See you in the exhibit hall theater at MLA 13 Friday at 1:30! IHE bloggers Mary Churchill, Nate Kreuter, and I will be on the “Career Advice” panel. I’ll offer tips for job candidates who are considering community colleges.

I still remember the terror and thrill of having my own class to teach for the first time.

My fellow IHE blogger, Lee Skallerup Bessette, got a bit of a discussion going on Twitter over the break when she posted a real estate listing for an abandoned college campus. In the context of adjunct activism, she proposed pulling people together to buy the campus and start their own college.

If you can read this, the world didn’t end. So there’s that.